Grama Delia told me how, after the death of our great ancestor Canonchet, the war ended. Our people had been broken, and many of those who survived were sold into slavery or ended up as indentured servants to the English. But they remembered the stories of their people and the history of all that happened to them. They passed it down, not in books but through storytelling.

Our Narragansett stories take me way back to the old times. Those stories have been here a lot longer than the houses and cars and streets that most everyone takes for granted here in Providence. Most people today haven’t learned what some of their own old houses know. Houses have memories that go even deeper than their walls. Old houses are connected to the earth that was there before they were built. They see with their windows, just like we do with our eyes. Some people, like Grama Delia, can actually look at the windows of certain old houses and see scenes from the past reflected in them. Just like watching a TV screen.

That is what Grama Delia’s stories have always been like for me. Through the windows of her stories, I could see what was here—and still is here. I could really see the glowing eyes of the cannibal skeleton or the long-nosed, heavy-bodied walking hill when she told me about them.

I usually loved it when she told me our old tales. The scarier the better. They reminded me that even little kids can defeat a monster if they know the right thing to do. No story was ever too scary for me—until she started to tell me about the Whisperer in the Dark.

The night when she began the story, I had insisted that since I was now all of nine years old, I was ready to hear her very scariest tale. Even then I had this fascination for anything about the supernatural, and I was sure I could handle it. But I’d been wrong. I soon started crying, and Mom put her arms around me. That made me feel better, but Grama Delia figured I’d had enough. She tied a knot in the tale.

“There is more to the story,” Grama Delia said. “But it can wait until later. Just remember, little one, nothing that hides in the dark is ever stronger than the sun. Now it’s time for your mother to tuck you in your bed.”